With a Love Song Stuck in My Throat

Upstairs, the room is packed and servers bustle around delivering beer and food to the tables, and the people standing at the back. Kris has traded in the faded blue T-shirt that she traveled in for a nicer, tighter, darker one, with a colorful phoenix-like creature embroidered on the front. I climb the stairs up and out of the belly of the Iron Horse and take my seat. A few minutes later, the band climbs up too, and takes the stage to rousing applause. And then the room is quiet.

The music begins and some members of her mostly female audience rock and nod and smile a little. Some close their eyes to listen, some sing along. This is no whiney, self-indulgent folk. She is bluegrass, banjos, and whiskey; vocals that can tear your heart out or soothe you like a lullaby. When she plays, it actually seems like she's playing, not working-—like this is what she does to relax.

She makes the men she plays with smile and laugh. She's charming, sweet, and genuine. She becomes completely absorbed in the music, but doesn't leave us out. Every now and then, she looks up and coyly smiles at the room so we'll know she hasn't forgotten us.

I sit in the darkness--flanked by her kind-hearted manager, Lisa, and her bandmate's roommate, Nolan--and look past the candle flickering next to my beer at Kris singing on stage. I watch the gold band on her right hand glint as her fingers strum those strings so confidently. I see her eyes close and her hips sway and I think to myself, she is the best of what's feminine. She's beautiful and soft, but strong, too. There is something about the equality, the mutual respect between Kris and her all-man band, which feels like the best kind of feminist victory. There she is, surrounded by four large, male musicians--her substantial 5'9" body looks so small next to them--but her presence is strongest. She's no diva. And despite her beauty, she's not using sex to control these men, or ego. What you can sense between them is respect and genuine affection.

One of her greatest gifts is collaboration; she is at her best, I think, when she is in the company of other musicians, and she has a reputation for never saying "no" when asked to play on other people's records. If you ask her what her favorite gig ever was, she'll mention the night she got to play solo for 10,000 people at the Telluride Festival, but then she'll tell you that her actual favorite show was the one she played at Sanders Theater in Boston with two other local independent artists, Lori McKenna and Jess Kline.

"We all had our bands, and we were booked into another place, but then that place closed, so at the last minute, we moved. It was 1,200 people and it was packed and I loved sharing it all with friends, playing together, sharing a really exciting show together," she says.

Her lyrics are evocative, and as they listen, her audience finds themselves transported to times and places when they felt exactly what she is singing about. In Damn Love Song, she sings, "How can I carve your name/in the trunk of a tree/that'll be here long after we're gone?/I can't even write it/in the steam on the mirror./And with nobody listening/not even myself/ it's as much as I can do/to whisper those words in your ear. /After all of these years/ look at me here/with a love song/stuck in my throat. /Got the weight of the world on my shoulders/I won't let it go... "

And I can't help but think of the love that I lost just a few months before. As the music fills the room, I rock slightly in my seat and I am there with him again...He holds me close, wraps me up in sweatered arms. I press my cheek against his chest, close my eyes, and smile. Knowing it couldn't last, hoping it would, doing it anyway. It comes in flashes as she sings: his muscular forearms, my hand brushing gently across his tattoo, his figure framed in a doorway.

The song is wrapping up, and I see his eyes looking so sad behind his glasses, hear him apologize and call me baby and then I watch him drive away again, into the darkness and the pouring rain…that turn to applause. I am clapping.

I'm shaken up, glad when it ends, but still…happy for the visit. I can tell, as I look out at the rapt audience, that mine are not the only heartstrings Kris's music and lyrics tug at. These singer-songwriters turn their hearts out for us; they bare themselves and invite us in. They do it with poetic and powerful lyrics, and by doing so, particularly from a stage in a darkened room or from a CD we can play when we're by ourselves, they let us know that we are not really alone. They help us to understand what it is that we are feeling, to name the thing that haunts us.

Sometimes the message is like the one scrawled downstairs in the green room mirror, "You're you. Deal with it."

And other times, a lyric will perfectly capture in a few simple words, an emotion that feels too complicated to explain.

"You are still a cliff, baby/and I still know how to fall," she sings.

And I think, "amen."

[ from an early draft of Naomi's unfinished, unpublished music book, "From The Mouths of Babes." Kris Delmhorst chapter. circa 2002; Photo credit: Cian Dalzell]